Stealth Startup Spy #118 - YC W24
An exclusive look at the Y Combinator Winter 24 batch before demo day next week....
Our newsletter has been diligently tracking all stealth startup activity. As Y Combinator’s latest batch sets to take the demo stage next week, we wanted to reflect on the YC W24 companies we were able to pick up far in advance of demo day next week.
Head over to Gravity to get an early look at this upcoming YC W24 batch - 266+ startups and 498 founders.
Many of these companies slowly exited stealth mode as demo day drew near. There are still under 10 companies that are still under stealth.
Some of the notable YC stealth signals we’ve already featured:
Peggy Wang : Co-Founder & CTO at Ego
An AI-native 3D simulation engine featured building in stealth mode exactly a year ago (SSS#14).
Paul-Louis Venard : Co-Founder at Phospho
An open-source text analytics platform that emerged from stealth mode 9 months ago (SSS#38).
Tolu Alabi : Co-Founder & CEO at Cleva Banking
An Africa-focused fintech startup by former Stripe alum, featured while still in stealth mode last July (SSS#48).
Claire Lee : Co-Founder & CEO at Scritch
Featured in SSS#69, an ex-Tesla ML engineer building a stealth AI pet healthcare startup.
Yucheng He : Co-Founder & CEO at Openmart
An engineer alum from Cruise, Pinterest, and Graft, building an AI agent to automate B2B e-commerce (SSS#74).
Kanishk Parashar: Co-Founder & CEO at Powder
A Gen-AI sales co-analyst for Wealth Advisors, who launched in December of last year (SSS#89)
Our team spent the last 6 weeks (over 700 combined hours) profiling every single YC W24 company so you don’t have to. (Full data set here)
Here’s some more interesting stealth activity happening this week in the YC W24 batch ahead of next week’s demo day…
🕵️♂️YC W24 Founders Coming Out of Stealth
Real-time updates from founders who debut what they’ve been working on under stealth mode
Joanne Wang - Co-Founder & CEO at Airfront
Prior Experience: Ex-B2B software investor at General Atlantic, ex-Investment Banking at Evercore and UBS
Connect on: LinkedIn
Airfront is an AI-first email platform with built-in automations.
HQ: San Francisco, California, United States
Industry: Software Development | Team Size: 2
Time Spent in Stealth Mode: 3 months
Dori Wilson - Co-Founder & CEO at Thorntale
FounderDNA: Masters Degree
Prior Experience: Ex-Senior Product Data Scientist at Pave, ex-Product Analytics Lead at Mux, ex-Data Analyst at CircleCI, ex-Data Scientist at Uber
Connect on: LinkedIn
Thorntale is building presentation software that makes it fast and easy to create persuasive decks using data
HQ: San Francisco, California, United States
Industry: Technology, Information and Internet | Team Size: 3
Time Spent in Stealth Mode: 4 months
Garrett Graves - Co-Founder & CTO at Quantic
FounderDNA: Technical Founder
Prior Experience: Ex-Software Engineer at Twitch, ex-Software Engineer at Mux, ex-Software Engineer at Applied Medical Device Institute - Grand Valley State University
Connect on: LinkedIn
Quantic is a next generation data provider for sales teams.
HQ: San Francisco, California, United States
Industry: Technology, Information and Internet | Team Size: 2
Time Spent in Stealth Mode: 6 months
Ori Eldarov - Co-Founder & CEO at OffDeal
FounderDNA: Masters Degree, Top 10 University
Prior Experience: Ex-Corp & Biz Dev at ConsenSys, ex-Vice President, Global Investment Banking at RBC Capital Markets, Harvard MBA
Connect on: LinkedIn
OffDeal is building AI agents that help individual buyers find and acquire small businesses.
HQ: San Francisco, California, United States
Industry: Technology, Information and Internet | Team Size: 3
Time Spent in Stealth Mode: 5 months
Dhruhin Kurli - Co-Founder & CTO at Patchwork
FounderDNA: Technical Founder, Former FAANG
Prior Experience: Ex-Software Engineer at Meta, ex-Software Engineer at Amazon Lab126, ex-Software Engineering Intern at Medallia
Connect on: LinkedIn
Patchwork supercharges team communication, replacing Slack with AI-assisted post creation, a ranked feed of the information, and chat for urgent needs.
HQ: San Francisco, California, United States
Industry: Technology, Information and Internet | Team Size: 2
Time Spent in Stealth Mode: 8 months
🕵️♂️Key YC W24 Founders Operating Under Stealth
Illuminating clues left behind by world class talent and influential innovators who just went into stealth mode
Kenta Onimura - Co-Founder at Stealth Startup
FounderDNA: Technical Founder, Former FAANG
Prior Experience: Ex-Software Engineer at Meta, ex-Software Developer at BuildUCLA, ex-Software Engineer Intern at Palantir Technologies, Apple and Symantec
Connect on: LinkedIn
HQ: San Francisco, California, United States
Building LLMs for ecommerce
Time Spent in Stealth Mode: 15 months
Lucas Young - Founder at Stealth Startup
FounderDNA: Technical Founder, Former FAANG
Prior Experience: Ex-Software Engineer at Google, ex-Software Engineer at Meta, ex-Software Engineer Intern at Apple, ex-Software Engineer Intern at ObserVR
Connect on: LinkedIn
HQ: San Francisco, California, United States
Building something in in computational imaging
Time Spent in Stealth Mode: 3 months
Thomas Li - Founder at Stealth Startup
FounderDNA: Technical Founder, Former FAANG, Top 10 University
Prior Experience: Ex-Software Engineer at Google, ex-Software Engineer at Lyft, ex-Computer Engineer at Berkeley Lab
Connect on: LinkedIn
HQ: San Francisco, California, United States
Time Spent in Stealth Mode: 3 months
Michael Wang - Co-Founder at Stealth Startup
FounderDNA: Serial Founder, Former FAANG
Prior Experience: Ex-Software Engineer at Cresta, ex-Technical PM at Facebook
Connect on: LinkedIn
HQ: San Francisco, California, United States
Building an AI startup
Time Spent in Stealth Mode: 15 months
Aaron Guo - Co-Founder at Stealth
FounderDNA: Top 10 University
Prior Experience: Ex-Private Equity & Growth Equity at Permira, ex-Investment Banking at Goldman Sachs, ex-Investment Banking at Credit Suisse
Connect on: LinkedIn
HQ: San Francisco, California, United States
Time Spent in Stealth Mode: 2 months
Stay Stealthy,
Drake
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